Outlook Journal Categories

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use the Outlook Journal quite a bit. One item that has annoyed me about it is the number of Journal categories that I don’t use and the lack of any capability inside of Outlook to add/remove/change those categories. For example, there are several categories of Journal entries that are suitable for use in an office environment where you use Exchange, but nowhere else. All is not lost, however. You can change the categories (at least a bit) to suit your needs. This involves editing the registry, however, so it is best done with a great deal of caution.

Make a system restore point before proceeding and definitely back up the portion of the registry that you’re going to change before you make any changes. To do this, go to the registry key where you’re going to make changes, right-click on the parent folder and select “Export”. Save the resulting .reg file somewhere easy to locate (it’s only going to be a few kilobytes of data). You can reimport the old data by double-clicking it.

Unless you really feel like messing up everyone else who uses your computer, make the changes in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Outlook\Journaling

The sub-keys are the categories for the Journal. You can rename them as you like, although you’ll may want to tinker a bit with the large and small icon entries to get the icon you want associated with it. I have not really messed with those, but as long as you have a good backup… Whatever you do, DO NOT CHANGE OR DELETE PHONE CALL. This is the default category and Outlook has hissy fits when it can’t find it. You can totally hoze yourself by messing with it, so just leave it alone.

Note that you are making changes in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, so whatever changes you make will only affect the currently logged-on account. Which means, oh great guru, that you can create a dummy user account, log on with that account, mess with those entries all you want, get them looking and behaving the way you want them to, export the changes and then import them with the account that you really want to change. Afterward, you can just delete the dummy account and its profile.

Again, make sure that you create a system restore point before making ANY registry changes and create a backup of the registry keys that you’re going to change BEFORE you change them (after you change them would be a good idea, too, but only if they’re working correctly).

This entry was posted on Sunday, 19 November 2006 at 18:50 and is filed under Applications, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.